Female Head from Assur
Back to life: The lifelike representation of a female head from Assur. ©Becca Saladin Segovia.
I want to share an exciting project I’ve been working on in the past year! As part of the project "Mesopotamia Sculptures in Colour", Astrid Nunn and Heinrich Piening had the opportunity to analyze the famous female head from Assur. I was given the opportunity to step in and reconstruct the 4000-year-old head, to make it more lifelike.
The statues of antiquity, whether they belonged to the Ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek or Roman culture, were brightly colored. Most colors are no longer preserved, so you have to actively search for them. This was the aim of the team around Astrid Nunn (Archaeologist, University of Würzburg/Germany) and Heinrich Piening (Restorer, Bavarian Administration of the Castles, Munich/Germany).
Original head c. 2100 BCE.
Testing pigments. ©Bavarian Palace Administration.
In several museums worldwide they investigated the polychromy of Mesopotamian stone statues dating from 4000-1000 BCE. With UV-VIS absorption spectroscopy, the pigments used can be measured and identified.
The small female head that I reconstructed was found in Assur, a thousand-year-old city located south of Mossul in Northern Iraq. Assur is a most famous Assyrian city was a thriving city from 3000-1000 BCE. The head itself is broken off above the neck, 7.5 cm high and carved in a beige alabaster. It is approximately 4000 years old, dating from the last century of the third millennium BCE. Not only is the head a marvelous piece of artistry, but we could still find enough colors on it.
The covered hair and bun suggest that the person depicted represents a lady from royal circles rather than a priestess. She is probably in her mid-20s, and would look very similar to populations of Iraq today. With their newly discovered colors, these statues are given life again. The lifelike representation makes ancient life more tangible for us, even if neither colors nor the modelling may be correct in all details. It brings us closer to the people of ancient Mesopotamia.
Virtual reconstruction
The reconstruction process began with Heinrich’s team providing reference materials, and a historically-accurate headdress was created and modeled. The next step was determining which possible skin shade to use. On the figure below, many skin shades were tested and modeled. The consensus was to find a sort of average based on the results of the sprectroscopy and to use one of the skin tones in the middle of the range.
© Heinrich Piening.
© Heinrich Piening.
I then began by creating an artificial intelligence approximation of the image, and then continued in Photoshop. Several photos were composited into the portrait image to create a more detailed and lifelike appearance, including skin and hair texture. The digital reconstruction was constantly compared to the original to make sure every proportion and feature matched the structure exactly. The headscarf reference image was then composited onto the portrait, and a period-appropriate earring style was added to the figure.
© Becca Saladin Segovia.